Re: Situation of long threads in -devel
Thank you for this message, Christian. It was really appreciated here.
Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> writes:
> I think that, in the very long threads that are currently cluttering up
> -devel, we would benefit from most participants to cool down and
> consider moving from the extreme positions I've seen when overreading
> the threads.
I'm personally trying to take a breather right now and erring on the side
of not responding.
Joss going from "what's the point in Standards-Version?" to filing a
Lintian bug asking for configuration capabilities to make it easier to
ignore the tag in the course of what felt like less than a day (this is
subjective -- I may well be *way* off) really hammered my mood more than
it probably should have. As both a Policy delegate and a Lintian
maintainer, I felt like it was direct criticism both coming and going, in
a fast-escalating argument that I didn't really have the energy to expend
on. I'm feeling way too much stress over it and it's feeling personal,
and that's not good, particularly since I'm sure it was not meant as
anything remotely personal. It's too easy to personally identify with the
things one works on, for all of us I think.
One of the things that I find difficult to deal with about these long
threads is that they very quickly begin to take up a huge amount of time,
but there's a feeling that if one doesn't participate, one's voice or
position won't be heard. Silence is taken to mean consent, or at least
apathy, and then people start acting. I suspect that feeling is partly
not true, but not entirely.
This is one of the reasons, from my perspective, why we have a Policy
process that doesn't come to a conclusion in a 200-message thread over the
course of a couple of days. (It, of course, errs on the side of being way
*too* slow, but that's mostly lack of manpower.) I really wish people
would not express apparently final personal decisions after a brief flurry
of messages that many people have barely had time to wrap their mind
around, particularly in the middle of a heated conversation.
> - ddebs: the situation seems fairly balanced between people who
> feel the need for a separate namespace by extension and those who
> think this is not necessary. The general need for automatically
> built debug pacakages does not seem to be questioned strongly
> (but I may have missed something: I certainly haven't read all
> thread branches, particularly when people were called names..:-))
I think there are a surprising number of parts of this discussion where
we've reached consensus. The number of things we're hammering out seems
to be decreasing. It would be great if someone would be willing to take
on writing up the consensus as they see it; I did one message, but things
have changed since then.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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